It's conker season again, and every morning around the horse chestnut tree near my children's school there are eager hands waiting to pick up the overnight droppings. But the hands aren't the tiny ones you might expect: most of the people filling their bags with the shiny brown nuts are mummies and daddies, not children. "I do wish they'd play conkers," my friend Alison sighs. "We loved it when I was a kid - I remember how much fun it was, soaking them in vinegar and then baking them in the oven in the hope of producing a champion. But my boys can never be bothered to go to all that trouble - the most they do is pick a few up and then discard them later in favour of a computer game."

This week's news story about the headteacher who is allowing his pupils to play conkers only while supervised and wearing protective goggles has brought hoots of laughter at school gates up and down the country, but it's more sad than funny. Most of us, like Alison, would be only too pleased if our children took an hour or two off from the telly to play a wholesome, fun game like conkers - some of us, like the parents I see near my children's school, even go to the slightly desperate lengths of harvesting them in the hope of revitalising a dying country pursuit.

Now, though, we're being told that it's dangerous: many schools have banned conkers, some on the grounds that kids can get hit in the eye, others because they fear for children with nut allergies. But according to Roger Vincent of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, there is no record of any conker-induced hospital admissions, and the Anaphylaxis Campaign says it's not aware of any severe reactions to conkers among children with nut allergies. At one of the few schools where conkers are welcomed, Woodlands Junior School in Tonbridge, Kent, there have been no unfortunate conker incidents of any kind.

So why the fuss? According to Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, conker worries are one more brick in the wall of what he calls paranoid parenting (he has written a book of the same name, outlining his fears for a society that wraps its children up in so much cotton wool that it risks suffocating them). But his real concern about this controversy is that it's a sign of parents going along with wider paranoia - and an illustration of how difficult it can be to swim against the tide. "What I've noticed over the last few years is that occasionally you get a ripple or a backlash and parents are shocked or outraged at how far we're going in overprotecting our children," he says. "But then within a short time what was outrageous is seen as 'common sense'. It happened a few years ago when the first schools said they were going to ban parents from videoing nativity plays and football matches at school. At first parents reacted against it, but now they accept it.

"The other thing I'm very aware of is how great the pressure is to conform when you're a parent. My son Jacob, who is nine, is the only boy his age around here who is allowed to go to tennis or swimming on his own - I've had people knock on our door to say did we know he was out of the house by himself. And what I find is that if his friends are coming over, the parents ring to check that we won't be letting them out unaccompanied. You're very much expected to fall in line, whatever your own feelings."

Furedi calls it tragic that so many parents today romanticise childhood, yearning for the simple pleasures of playground games such as conkers, when the reality for their children is so different. And it's not only urban life that has changed for the worse, he says: rural areas, like his own, are much the same. "There might be more opportunities for freedom and play in the countryside, but the same regime of fear exists," he says. "You hear of people who move to a place where there are more outside spaces, but then they never let their kids out of their sight to experience it."

All of which raises the question: why have we allowed our fears, which are largely out of proportion or even groundless, to overshadow our children's lives so? It is only common sense to realise there is no way we can ever totally remove danger from their lives: tragic accidents happen in the most unlikely of circumstances, such as the terrible incident last week when two-year-old twins Betsy and William Woodbridge were crushed to death in their bedroom after they pulled a chest of drawers down on top of them during a game - their mother thought they were safely tucked in bed having a nap at the time.

So freak accidents will always happen: and while we busy ourselves trying to prevent them, the real danger around the corner for society as a whole is the obesity and ill health that come as a result of a too inactive, too mollycoddled childhood. While we try to plug the tiny gaps in our children's safety portfolio, we are failing to grapple with the huge dangers that threaten them with early death, heart disease and cancer.

The fact is, parenting is dominated by paradoxes: and one of the keenest of all is walking the line between keeping children safe, and allowing them to experience - and so learn to deal with - pain, fear and danger. No parent is happy at the sight of a child with a bruised knee, a torn jumper or a cut finger: but sometimes that's the price that has to be paid for a small adventure with a big lesson.

About this article

Paranoid parenting

This article appeared on p17 of the G2 section of the Guardian
on Tuesday 5 October 2004.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 11.20 EDT on Wednesday 6 October 2004.
It was last modified at 11.20 EST on Thursday 3 November 2005.
It was first published at 11.20 EST on Thursday 3 November 2005.